Silicon Solar Thin Film Manufactured for Under $0.70 Cents a Watt by Swiss Company Oerlikon

October 17th, 2010 by Susan Kraemer

First Solar, which broke the $1.00 a Watt price barrier last year, is currently the low cost leader in being able to produce (non-silicon based) thin film at $0.76 cents a Watt, and they have been rewarded with contracts from major utilities such as PG&E for solar thin film installations on a utility scale.

But now Swiss solar equipment manufacturing giant Oerlikon Solar has announced that their company can enable solar manufacturers to produce their amorphous silicon thin film modules at a cost under $0.70 cents per watt (€ 0.50). Silicon is both more widely available and more sustainable than typical thin film solar; that contains rare earth minerals.

Their new equipment to mass-produce thin film silicon solar modules lowers costs by making it possible to use thinner layers of silicon, reducing material costs, and it uses more reflective back sheets that can capture stray electrons escaping around the edges otherwise; increasing efficiency.

Those changes reduced the capital expenditure for its customers by 25%, enabling solar panel production with (NREL rated) 12% efficiency, almost half that of the most efficient traditional solar.

(The lower efficiency of thin film just means that it just takes more square feet of panel to make the same electricity. But since it can be painted or printed directly on glass windows, plastic and other cheap construction materials, it is not the great flaw you might think.)

This has been a year of major shake ups in thin film solar. Until this year, the relatively lower price for thin film was its competitive strength against traditional silicon-based solar. But with the worldwide ramp-up in solar production, silicon prices also dropped dramatically, battling thin film on its home turf, low cost.

Thin film producers became simply unable to compete on what had been till now, their strength – prices lower than those for traditional panels.

As a result of the precipitous drop in silicon-based solar, making it more competitive with thin film, even Applied Materials got out of the thin film solar business a few months ago, no longer able to compete with silicon-based (traditional) solar PV.

However, as a wholesale supplier of equipment to the solar industry, to make panels with, the award-winning innovator is at the beginning of the supply chain. So panels made on this equipment won’t be producing power in a field or on a roof till 2012. If the recent past is any indication, during this much time in this very fast-changing business, anything could happen.

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Tags: $0.70 a Watt, $1.00 a Watt, First Solar, Oerlikon Solar, silicon solar thin film

About the Author

Susan Kraemer writes at CleanTechnica, CSP-Today, PV-Insider , SmartGridUpdate, and GreenProphet. She has also been published at Ecoseed, NRDC OnEarth, MatterNetwork, Celsius, EnergyNow, and Scientific American. As a former serial entrepreneur in product design, Susan brings an innovator's perspective on inventing a carbon-constrained civilization: If necessity is the mother of invention, solving climate change is the mother of all necessities! As a lover of history and sci-fi, she enjoys chronicling the strange future we are creating in these interesting times. Follow Susan on Twitter @dotcommodity.

Mata

Actually the new Kai has a space for 10 more glasses than the actual Kai 1200… and with help with light trapping there is able to reduce the amount of Si on the a-Si and µc-Si cells… this reduction of thickness represents a reduction in production time…

to be able to lower the costs to $0.70 is made by the reduction of deposition time and not by saving matrial

nice article
John

Hey so has anyone considered putting this stuff on the windows for a car so that the windows automatically trickle charge the batteries? I’m just thinking that would be a really cool way to recharge your hybrid or regular cars battery.
- Captain Obvious
  
  Since it was your idea, how about calculating the payback time and reporting back? Also, how far would you go on a day’s charging? I think you would learn a lot.
sola

If their process is really capable of producing 12% efficient cells for 70c/watt than I would say it is a big comeback for amorphous solar.
- http://cleantechnica.com/author/susan Susan Kraemer
  
  NREL rated these. Plus, if anything, these kinds of engineering-heavy EU companies err on the side of being ridiculously modest! I once covered a world-leader EU engineering company that had been around for about a hundred years, that described itself on the website as “solvent’.
http://www.dimensionbuildlv.com remodeling

We are still only scratching the surface. The wattage produced needs to be greatly increased to make it more desirable for homeowners. As a remodeling contractor, I am still finding it difficult to get many people on board with the idea of putting solar panels on their roofs. With a higher wattage return on their dollar, it would be easier to show the benefits.